By: George Burmeister*

Local government leaders are starting to see the climate and economic necessity of decarbonizing and transitioning to 100-percent renewable electricity supply. They are now focusing on the importance of investments to transform their economies by the productive use of clean energy resources. As highlighted by John “Skip” Laitner and his team in the recent report for the International Partnership for Energy Efficiency Cooperation (IPEEC), there is a clear need for substantial investments into proven Best Energy Management Practices.

The Colorado Energy Group is the manager of one of the largest local government clean energy Best Practice databases in the world. We are also an implementor of local clean energy programs. Local government Best Practices have advanced light-years from the important and popular, but now largely routine, energy savings performance contracts and lighting replacement programs.

Local government clean energy Best Practices now include more sophisticated initiatives such as behavior change-focused neighborhood energy efficiency competitions, energy saving challenges between businesses, aggregating residential electric water heaters as energy storage, establishing peer-to-peer networks for sharing private electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, and community solar projects that allow consumers with no viable access to solar to purchase solar remotely.

Most of these initiatives tend to rely on monitoring, data analysis, and communications equipment—which can be expensive. It is no longer simply about one Public Works employee analyzing his/her homemade Excel spreadsheet months later. This analysis now happens near instantly.  It’s “not your father’s Oldsmobile anymore,” as the saying goes.

Best Practices can now be much larger in scope, and much more productive in their use—with greater consequences and many more moving parts. As an example, there isn’t a day that goes by that our own team is asked about Community Choice Energy (CCE) programs. This refers to a new means to obtain cleaner and less-expensive electricity to local homes and businesses, even as there is greater local control over how that electricity is sourced.

Through CCE initiatives, local governments create a new public agency responsible for purchasing and producing electricity. The local utility remains responsible for delivering that electricity, maintaining transmission and distribution lines, and handling the billing needs. And if all goes well, the communities then gain control over their own power supply.

The good news, however, is that it does not stop at CCE. Some communities, like Boulder, Colorado even go as far as to municipalize and attempt to take over their energy supply on the path to decarbonization. Wrestling control of the local energy supply is not for the meek or uncommitted; Boulder has been working on municipalizing for almost a decade, and they still are not finished.

In a 2017 report, Pathways to 100: Energy Supply Transformation Primer for Cities, the authors suggest three primary steps to establishing a pathway to zero carbon use: (1) mapping the city’s energy landscape; (2) identify available strategies; and (3) organizing for the energy transformation.

Colorado Energy Group and Santa Clara, CA-based Optony recently won a bid to design and help start a “Solar and Storage Strategy” for the City of Boulder that essentially mirrored these steps. With or without successful municipalization, the City wanted to know how it could meet local renewable generation target goals of 50 Megawatts (MW), 100 MW, and 175 MW in three phases, by 2020, 2030, and 2050 respectively. These were part of formal goals agreed to by the Boulder City Council on December 7, 2016.

At that point when the City approved the strategy, it had only 37 MW of renewables in 2017. Much of this was older hydroelectric capacity so meeting the transformative clean generation goals was, and still is, a very tall order. After almost a year of analysis, our team concluded that the best way to accomplish these aggressive renewables goals was through major financial investments in solar photovoltaics (PV) and energy efficiency; and anything but the business-as-usual scenarios.

We mapped the energy landscape and found that the total local potential rooftop solar siting capacity alone was approximately 500 MW. This is nearly three times the City’s target. We then identified the solar and clean energy potential of the region, while identifying more than 50 available investment strategies for the City to pursue that could help reach their goals. In short, the impact of solar programs is magnified, quite substantially, by simultaneous investments in energy efficiency programs. As shown in the Figure 1 above, energy efficiency and solar strategies (highlighted in yellow) should be combined to help the City to reach their renewable energy goals. For example, if Boulder pursues a community solar program, or helps arrange the leasing of either private or municipal rooftops for solar applications, it should be done in concert with zero net energy (ZNE) buildings support, green leases rewarding landlords and tenants for energy efficiency investments, more stringent energy codes, and an emphasis on rewarding voluntary above-code actions taken by the community.

Developing leading-edge strategies to achieve decarbonization and renewable energy goals, and also investing in greater local energy production versus sending that money elsewhere, have been shown to be a smart and productive investment for the Boulder economy. It is, therefore, worth the effort needed to drive all of the strategies presented here. The full Boulder report and its accompanying appendix was uploaded on the City’s website in March 2018. We welcome additional thoughts and feedback.

*George Burmeister is President of Colorado Energy Group. He is based in Boulder, Colorado, earns most of his living in California, and participates in clean energy projects virtually anywhere on the planet.